Gondar, Ethiopia: 1971-1975 Guests in the Ethiopian Highlands and Children of Zemecha

Contents

PREFACE

Guests in the Ethiopian Highlands,

1971-1973

Chapter One: This is Africa!

Chapter Two: Voices of Gondar

Chapter Three: Student Strikes and American Doctors

Chapter Four: Gondar at Christmas

Chapter Five: The New Year

Chapter Six: Driving North to Axum, Asmara and the Red Sea

Chapter Seven: Gondar in the Spring

Chapter Eight: Addis and Points South During the Emperor’s Last Days

Chapter Nine: Events in Addis, Awash Park and Points South West

Chapter Ten: Return to Gondar, The Long Drive Home

Chapter Eleven: Gondar in Meuskeureum

Chapter Twelve: Autumn Beginnings, Endings and Christmas

Chapter Thirteen, New Year, 1973

Chapter Fourteen: The Outside World Intrudes

Children of Zemecha, 1973-1975

Chapter Fifteen: Friends, a Comet and Butterflies

Chapter Sixteen: The Slow Revolution

Chapter Seventeen: Stories by Daniachew Worku, Anarchy and Arrests

Chapter Eighteen: Upheaval in Gondar

Chapter Nineteen: Revolution Observed – Circle Trip in Ethiopia

Chapter Twenty: Students and Friends

Chapter Twenty-one: The Emperor Deposed and Ethiopia Tikdem (Ethiopia First)

Chapter Twenty-two: Slow Revolution Continues

Chapter Twenty-three: Revolution and Civil War

Chapter Twenty-four: The last few months

Chapter Twenty-five: Children of Zemecha

Chapter Twenty-six: Letters from Zemecha

Chapter Twenty-seven: Leave Taking

Post Script: The Party I Wish We Had Given

Appendix A: Sara Rajan’s Tamil recipes from her Gondar kitchen

Appendix B: Butterflies

Sources

PREFACE

This is an account of the northern Ethiopian city of Gondar and its people when I lived there with my husband and two young children in the early 1970’s. While this book is personal, it is also a compilation of experiences, both my own and others, seen against a tapestry of Ethiopian history as it unfolded around us, day by day.

I have to remind myself of the importance of information and communication in a place and time when television reception was poor, there were few land phones and cell phones were not yet invented, and we had never heard of personal computers. Rumors, news, and people’s stories, all were gathered in through the grape vine by truck drivers and other travelers up and down the highway and from friends with some access to telephones. Everyone was hungry for information. We bought every international edition of magazines we could find. Our dinner time was always BBC news time (local radio was seldom in English), and we scanned the English language edition of the government-controlled Ethiopian Herald, even though most of the news was canned propaganda from the government of Emperor Haile Selassie I, Lion of Judah.

This book is written as a Thank you to the people of the city of Gondar for hosting us, and especially to the people who worked for us and interacted with us, much as members of their own family. The first title, Guests in the Ethiopian Highlands, reflects the fact that because of them it was possible for my family to make a home so far away from home for nearly four years.

First among these was Chokola, the woman who prepared our meals, managing all things domestic, watching over the health and well being of Ruth, Tom, Clark and me, and helping with hurt feelings when cultural differences made me insensitive to others (and to her). Thank you, Chokola. Included in this also are Taga, and our neighbors for whom she cooked, Sister Adonitch (Sister, a British term indicating she is a registered nurse), and her husband, Ato (Mr) Makonnen. They were the first to feel the strain of having inexperienced Americans move in just a few yards from their front door.

The second part of the book, Children of Zemecha, refers to Ethiopia’s younger generation but especially to the many students who worked for us, befriending my family, helping with everything from acting as translators to digging gardens, who taught us so much about their country and helped us feel at home.

Eventually, when the big changes came, these young men and women were hopeful of the direction their country was taking, proud that they would play a key role in the plans of the new revolutionary government, the Derg, and its then shadowy spokesperson, Mengistu Haile Mariam. With enthusiasm, they prepared to join Zemecha, a campaign that would send them into the countryside to improve literacy and prepare outlying villages for reforms at the rural level.

I can not imagine the destruction that Gondar and all Ethiopia endured in the years that followed under Mengistu Haile Mariam’s dictatorship and all that came after. This journal seeks to celebrate the goodness, energy, intelligence and idealism of Ethiopia’s youth. I am sure that these traits still exist there in abundance.

In addition to those already mentioned, several people contributed an especially important part to this story. First are our friends, the Rajan family, Theodore, Sara, Ray, and Jay. Then are individual students such as Worku, Abaja, Tsegaw, Kassa, and Fille. Some of our student friends sent letters from their early Zemecha assignments and these letters are included in a final chapter. I hope they approve of this.

The grounds keeper, Teshager Demisee, and his experiences are found throughout this book. In addition, three of Teshager’s original drawings make up the cover of this book as well as the cover of the smaller book, Christmas in Gondar. Teshager created these color pen drawings while helping Chokola entertain Ruth and Tom during afternoons at our house. I extend a special thanks to Teshager, and I hope he and his family may approve of, and enjoy, seeing his art work and reading the parts of his life story that are included in these pages.

A few notes on geographical boundaries and group names. Since the 1970’s, the provincial boundaries have been redrawn and renamed around the city of Gondar, but I continue to refer to its former name, Begemdir Province. Also, when we were first introduced to Ethiopia, in the highlands of Addis and Gondar, the Amhara were still presented to the world as the dominant group of people and Amhara still declared the national language by order of the Emperor. During our time in Ethiopia, it was only slowly and imperfectly that we began to learn about the power, the important traditions, and the great population size, of other Ethiopian groups. I have tried to reflect modern usage regarding the Beta Israel and Oromo. I ask the readers indulgence if this book appears Amhara-centric and if any other obsolete group names or tribal terms are used.

This book would never have been completed but for the encouragement of three former students, Ezana Habte-Gabr, Khwaja Talha, and Wossen Hailu. About a year ago, I was flabbergasted to hear from these men by e-mail telling me that while searching for any news from Ethiopia, they came upon two of the Christmas stories published in the electronic magazine, FOCUS/Midwest, and locally in the Illinois Times. Before hearing from them, I was skeptical that a middle-class, white American wife and mother had anything worthwhile to add to writings about Ethiopia. But they let me know, if nothing else, these writings had helped them recover some childhood memories disrupted by change, chaos, and revolution, and to reclaim a bit of their lost past.

Ezana Habte-Gabr, who now lives with his family in Colombia, South America, was a student at the Gondar International Elementary School, together with his brother, Tewodros. Their father, Dr. Eyassu Habte-Gabr, was Dean of the Public Health College and Hospital, and their mother, Lucy Habte-Gabr, is featured in the Christmas stories as Father Christmas at the school pageant. Ezana has done some fact checking for me and continues to encourage me that this journal has a contribution to make.

Khwaja Talha, who lives in New Delhi, India, is the younger brother of Saeeda who was a student in Sara Rajan’s class at Gondar International Elementary School, and Khwaja and his family lived near the Rajan family. As Khwaja recollects in his e-mail to me, "My father’s name was K.S. Ahmad, he used to wear spectacles, those old fashioned, olden days, big rimmed ones. My mother was at that time a teacher at the Gondar International nursery/primary school. My elder sister’s name is Saeeda, while my younger sister’s name is Hina who perhaps was not so prominent since she was a toddler at this time.

"But what surprised me most was the clarity by which you wrote the article in the Illinois Times. The details could not have been clearer. The names are just flawless. The description of the place cannot be improved upon. And behind it I believe are the people of those times who inhaled pure air, pure food, no pesticides, no pollution and lived life larger than life itself in all conditions, because at this present age of mine, it becomes difficult to even recall what the events are in detail of a week gone by."

Wossen Hailu currently lives in Arlington, Virginia. He is the elementary school student who, along with his parents, Grazmach Hailu and Weisero Zawaditu, is featured in the story, Why There is no Christmas Tree in Gondar. In Wossen’s e-mail, he writes that his parents "both passed away a long time ago, but they did get released from prison back then.

I was really amazed how much you know about my parents and the situation they were in. The only thing I remember was that both of them were imprisoned. My mother told me the story after I grew up and when I read the story you wrote it just took me back. Wossen adds that he has no pictures from school those days, and I am preparing a collection of photographs which I hope to send him before too long.

Before bringing this preface to an end, I must thank the Ethiopian graphics artist, Falaka Aarmide Yimer, currently residing in Sydney, Australia, for permission to include two of his prints, Ethiopian Boy and Ethiopian Girl. We bought these prints in 1974, at a gallery in Addis Ababa, at the start of our last trip through the country, and they are reproduced side-by-side on the title page for part two, "Children of Zemecha."

Thank you also to friends Jacqueline Dougan Jackson, Carol Manley (now deceased), Mitch Hopper, and Roland Klose for help with re-writes, preparing images, and editing. Roland Klose was especially generous with his time and experience as a writer and journalist, editing the initial manuscript, and this at a time when there seemed little hope of making it fit for public consumption. I also thank our daughter Ruth and my husband Clark for more than can be expressed.

I take responsibility for the material in this book. These stories, reflections and interpretations of events are my own, as I recorded them at the time in journals, and expanded on them later preparing the manuscript. Some readers may disagree with what they read here and I welcome hearing from you. Some may feel hurt or misrepresented by what I have written and for this I can only say this was not my intention and I am sorry. To everyone who cares about things Ethiopian, I invite you to contact me at my e-mail, bolson1000@sbcglobal.net

Barbara Wyatt Olson,

Springfield, Illinois

Summer 2010

Guests in the Ethiopian Highlands,

1971-1973

. . . the murmur of human voices . . . the doves and wild pigeons calling from the foliage of the koso trees; cranes, herons, ducks, geese and ibises . . . everything as it used to be thousands of years ago. -- Daniachew Worku, The Thirteenth Sun, 1973, p. 30.

The Queen of Sheba

Ruth Olson DeVries

Chapter One: This is Africa!

On September 6, 1971, we fly directly from Chicago’s O’Hare airport to Frankfurt, Germany, on our way to northern Ethiopia where Clark has a two-year contract to teach chemistry and biology at a branch of the Haile Selassie I University. Clark has traveled around the world, including biology expeditions in the Indian Ocean and Guyana, but the rest of us have hardly been outside the United States.

Tommy is two years old and Ruth will celebrate her fifth birthday in October after we reach our new home. They’re young but good travelers, and both have gone along with us on many camping and birding trips in the U.S. Now, however, I am having misgivings, remembering that less than two months ago I couldn’t even find Ethiopia on a map.

By the time we have checked into the Ambassador Hotel it is dusk, and with just one evening in Frankfurt, there won’t be time to take in the German atmosphere. Instead of dark beer and schnitzel, dinner is a quick stop at a sleazy joint on the corner, where we’re squeezed in with lots of American soldiers, for an American hamburger and fries. Then, at just 5 p.m., we all fall into bed, exhausted.

After a few hours, Clark crawls out of bed, pulls on his shoes and tiptoes out for a walk. We had figured on being tired, but forgot that by midnight we would all be starving. Ruth and I get up and eat all the candy from home, then sit on the bathroom floor where the light won’t wake Tom, doing punch-out books and a magic drawing board from the airplane. Everyone is on a different schedule, which, as the Mom, I am trying to untangle, keep straight and re-coordinate, but I cannot even figure out what happened to yesterday.

When Clark returns from his walk, he reports that the streets are filled with American soldiers patronizing the all-night sex shows and beer and sausage bars. We could use some of that right now, the sausage anyway!

We all join Tommy back in bed, wrapped together in a thick, super-light down comforter – the kind I’ve heard so much about, but only seen at my German sister-in-law’s house in Chicago. Before sunrise, on what seems like Monday morning, the room feels bitterly cold. Tom is bundled up, drinking Tang from a baby bottle, Ruth snuggled between us. Our flight to Africa won’t be leaving until 8 p.m., but because we are more poor students than world travelers, we must save the cash we have brought with us. Check-out time is 10 a.m. and we pack up everything and take to the streets.

There are no plans for any European history or visiting old castles or museums, but we take as many bus rides around town as possible, heading generally in the direction of the airport. Finally, after an early lunch, we discover a big park with modern play equipment for the kids who are excited to be able to run off, climb and slide. Clark and I are relieved to just sit and watch the kids playing and the people walking by. I wonder, can people tell we are foreigners?

Probably not. Most of the other pedestrians don’t look very German, either. A recent copy of Time Magazine reports that large numbers of immigrants from Turkey and Middle Eastern countries now come over on work passes. The park is bustling with street cleaners, gardeners and grounds keepers with beards who all look much darker than the locals we saw in the hotel. By afternoon, exhausted, we catch a bus to the airport for the evening flight to Addis Ababa, via Rome and Asmara.

From Frankfurt to Rome, the plane is half empty. We have double seats, stretch out, and sleep. But at Rome the cabin fills to overflowing. Northern Ethiopia is home to many people of Italian origin and it looks as if they are all returning after long vacation visits to the motherland. Clark encourages Ruth to sleep in a seat beside him. But poor little Tommy. I keep him beside me, but he is too tired to sleep and cries all the way from Rome to Asmara. Everyone is concerned, and the many children now on board smile and talk to him, trying to cheer him up, in several different languages.

Asmara, capital city of Eritrea Province in northern Ethiopia, is our first stop on the African continent. The first rays of dawn reveal black outlines of mountains across the horizon while closer by, silhouettes of tall, flat-topped thorn trees, the African acacia, take shape around the edges of the airport in the growing light. One hour after taking off from Asmara, we land in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia. At about 8,300 feet, Addis seems the same height as Asmara, but I wonder why we see no mountains. Maybe we are on top of them here, on the top of the highland plateau. The sun is bright and the sky clear, the day’s storm clouds barely show as yet on the horizon. September is at the tail end of the long rainy season and no matter in which direction I look, the view to the horizon is lush green overlaid by thick tangles of butter-yellow Maskal daisies.

Addis Ababa: What happened to Tuesday? I lost a day. We’re disheveled nomads – no home, no job, with only what we carry on our backs. Fortunately, we do have things in our pockets: passports, airplane tickets, hotel reservations, an official contract for future employment, and a carefully guarded supply of Travelers’ Checks. In addition, there are the important intangibles – the support of both sets of grandparents back home who had tried hard not to show exactly how much they would miss us all, and good friends back in Miami and Chicago.

Ruth carries her doll, crayons, drawing paper, some cookie wrappers, a favorite blouse with matching pants, and a pair of transparent pink plastic heels which she had begged me not to pack in our suitcases or in the steamer trunks that are scheduled to arrive in a couple of months, and now carries in a tote bag she holds tight with both arms. I carry Tom’s favorite Bert and Ernie puppet dolls, drawing supplies, and extra clothes. Although he’s two, I’ve included three pacifiers anyway, along with a baby bottle for juice if our circumstances become desperate. Tom wears his favorite wind-up music box on a strap around his neck – the way Clark wears his birding binoculars – and plays it over and over again for as long as the rest of us can stand hearing it. As for Clark and me, we see that everything else gets lugged along.

We stare dumbly around the Addis airport, mentally preparing ourselves for the next big task in this journey – claiming checked luggage, getting processed through customs, finding a taxi and then our hotel. But everything became suddenly much easier. A tall, dark, and handsome man is waving at us and calling out, Dr. Olson, Dr. Olson. Someone knows our name! How good this makes me feel. I never learn his name, only that he is an administrator with the Haile Selassie I University, here to help us. He has our visas, too. We are concerned because these are just tourist visas, but he explains that work permits will soon be issued. We were not expected for two more weeks. Our good Samaritan explains we are the first in a group of several Americans coming to teach at the university. The others are not arriving for two more days. We, however, are the only Americans who will be traveling on, north to Gondar.

Addis is said to be built on seven hills. The city’s many tall buildings are spread out over them with a lot of space between. As we pull up to the thoroughly modern Hotel d’Afrique, I say, Addis has so many modern buildings, and you have space for expansion. His answer seems almost rueful, Yes, we certainly have space.

Our hotel room is on the second floor, overlooking back gardens and a parking lot, all enclosed by tall concrete walls topped with broken glass with a heavy iron gate and guard house. The lot is crowded with Land Rovers guarded by armed men dressed in Army-style uniforms or in shorts and shoes without socks, all with their shoulders and heads wrapped in heavy white cotton shawls against the cold, crisp mountain air.

On the first day I am too timid to consider taking the children outside of our hotel room, but there is plenty to see right from the window. Ruth counts donkeys as they are led through the nearby neighborhood streets beyond the walls of the hotel gardens. We all try to figure out why so many people carry arms full of long, green grass.

Clark is scheduled to meet at the university within the hour to fill out more paperwork. As he waits he is spotting birds, exotic birds which he has never seen before, but only read about in his two heavy volumes of Mackworth-Praed and Grant, Birds of Eastern and North-Eastern Africa. Clark calls us to the window, pointing out a tangle of woven grass hanging in a clump of eucalyptus. A greenish and yellow Baglafecht Weaver pops in and out, feeding its young. Nearby, a Tekeze Sunbird flashes metallic bronzy green in the late morning sunshine. Clark thumbs through the bird book to identify something plain, ashy brown and very shy, lurking under hedges of scarlet blooming poinsettia and roses, finally finding that it is a Brown-Rumped Seedeater.

In the next few days, I am relieved to meet some of the other newly arrived Americans who have teaching contracts, as do we, with the TransCentury Corporation, a private contractor to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Everyone is eager to get settled as soon as possible. Soon, everybody else is gone, moving into the American community around the city, and leaving us without our primary source of news and gossip.

As for my little family, no one can tell us when we are to leave for Gondar and what to expect after we get there, much less describe the town. Dr. Tim Jefford, a British botany professor who has taken us under his wing, tells us he thinks he has met someone who once traveled through Gondar. They stayed in some place called the China Cinema Bar. I am going to have to be satisfied with that for now.

The days pass and Tim introduces us to other Englishmen he calls old Ethiopia hands. The wife of one is planning to take the Ethiopian Airlines’ Historic Route Tour – she will go to see the ancient ruins in Axum, take a side trip by mule into the Simien Mountains, and stop to see the underground churches carved out of the living rock at Lalibela, and plans to be in Gondar after Christmas in time for Temqeut, or Epiphany, celebrating Jesus’s baptism by John and the most important holy day in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church after Easter.

Clark and I are not sure what occurs at Temqeut, or why Gondar is the place to celebrate it. We hadn’t been able to locate many publications about Ethiopia, and had been depending on the encyclopedia, which primarily addresses how, in the 1930’s, the British brought the Emperor Haile Selassie I to England to keep him safe as the Italians invaded in World War II. Clark’s family found a Life magazine book series on Ethiopian food. That was about all. We both like the idea of having visitors after we get settled so I smile, trying my best to sound knowledgeable and confident. Pass the word on if you see them, I say. Tell them to be sure to drop in.

Soon Clark is spending more time at university meetings, reviewing biology and chemistry curricula. Tom, Ruth and I drive along with him to see more of the city and to wander about the university grounds, visiting the various botany and zoology exhibits.

It was about a year ago that Clark first heard about this teaching post through his friend, Emil Urban, who had already been teaching at the Haile Selassie I University for 10 years. Emil was on study leave with his wife and daughter, working in the biology department at the University of Miami. It was the friendship between the two men that led to our deciding to enquire about a position here. Emil was quite clear: the teaching could be frustrating because university students spent a lot of time out on strike. On the other hand, this left more time to see the country and study its natural history.

The Urban family is not scheduled to return from the United States for another month, long after we are settled in Gondar; however, they asked Tim Jefford to locate us after we arrived. Tim passes on a dinner invitation from Dr. Baxter, a Canadian who is head of the chemistry department.

People eat late around here, so the night is already pitch black as we pile into Tim’s VW Beetle outside Hotel d’Afrique and head across the city. Rain comes down hard. We bump along dark, narrow streets made from boulders sunk in mud, finally arriving at an iron gate barely visible through the down pour. A dark form walks forward to unlatch the gate and we bump and bounce through. In the shadows, I see silhouettes of horses, their rumps turned to the beating rain. Dr. Baxter is waiting for us on the lighted porch. He greets us, leading the way into a bedroom which, he says, is being kept clear to receive visitors. The rest of the house is in an uproar as it is the time of the annual plastering. Later, we eat dinner at one end of a half plastered dining room; the other half is filled with shaky scaffolding and homemade ladders nailed together from rough eucalyptus saplings.

The rain lets up a bit and the gatekeeper together with a boy named Gato take Tommy outside to get a rabbit which they release to hop about between our feet. Ruth plays with Alamayu, a boy about her age, who Dr. Baxter says is both the foster son of the cook and nephew of the teen-aged assistant cook. Over the course of the evening I begin to realize that the house is full of Ethiopians, all related somehow to one another, and all of whom seem to live on this compound.

Each year during the rainy season, Mrs. Baxter leaves the cold, wet highlands to camp in the Rift Valley to the south, not to return until the plastering is finished. It is hard to believe that just now, when Addis is so cold and wet that the resorts and lakes of the Rift Valley only an hour or two to the south are warm, sunny and dry.

Dr. Baxter takes us for a tour around his rambling house, many sections looking as if added as an afterthought. I am struck by the kitchen. It looks so empty, dark, impersonal, and I wonder if this reflects the efficient disinterest of a servant/cook. Homesick now, I recall our little kitchen in Miami, on South West 21st Street, where strings of garlic and decorative onions hung over the sink and cupboard doors were covered with Ruth and Tom’s art work. In other kitchens, books lined the walls and, political arguments sounded over Puccini arias and the occasional shriek of a peacock bedding down on the roof..

But my friend Allison would have won the prize with her collection of apricot brandy bottles, heirloom cake molds from her mother, chipped antique colored-glass apothecary jars of various sizes holding discoveries of the moment such as curry, raw sugar, nuts. One especially big jar was half filled with bird seed in which nested a tiny pet mouse. Allison kept coffee mugs on wall pegs, and a pot of fresh coffee ready on the stove, itself surrounded by empty ice cream boxes, packages of Pepperidge Farm white bread, half empty sugar cereal containers, and an ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts.

Tim Jefford is house sitting for the Urbans while they on home leave, and he invites us to move in too. Their house is newer, more modern than the Baxter’s, with three bedrooms and well polished wooden floors throughout as well as collections of African arts and crafts, including wool Ethiopian rugs. But the house is built from stone and concrete and feels cold and damp, at least now during the rains. The bathroom is spectacular, large and airy. The floor is made up of foot-wide white Italian tile. One large window opens into the back garden. Before renting a house, people check on the water supply which can vary from neighborhood to neighborhood. This house has ample water, never running out, but water pressure is variable. Often no more than a dribble of water comes out of the shower head, and it all must be boiled before drinking.

The house and garden compound is surrounded by a high wall topped with broken glass, and all compounds have gate guards or zabanias, one for the day and another one for night, as well as a couple of dogs. The rains go on and on. That, and my reluctance to explore outside on my own, means the children and I have remained within the compound for days. Ruth tells me she misses her friends back home, but she is looking forward to Alamayu’s birthday party coming up soon at the Baxter’s. The Urban’s compound is pretty and the garden is thick with plants and birds, so on one morning in only thirty minutes Clark is able to show me several new birds, including a Little Bee-eater, White Vented Bulbul, Olive Thrush, Ruppel’s Robin Chat, Abyssinian Catbird, and a Streaky Seedeater.

One hundred years ago Emperor Menelik II chose this setting for his capital because it was safely up in the mountains and had plenty of forests to provide wood for cooking and construction for the large number of people in his entourage. Previously, rulers, together with their court – armies, servants, artisans, and all their family members – lived in tents and as the forest was exhausted in one area, they would move somewhere else; however, Menelik ordered that the fast-growing eucalyptus tree should be brought in and used to reforest the mountains around his capital, finally allowing the location to become permanent. The exact location of the original site is said to be down these hills, further into town near the present royal palace at Filwoha, the hot springs. Menelik’s wife, the Empress Taitu, chose the name for the capital, Addis Ababa, which means New Flower.

It is evening now, our clothes are really not warm enough and the house feels cold. We are Floridians, coming from years of living in Miami, not England, and have no woolens, so all we can do is curl up on the heavy rug in front of the fireplace. Tom and I are under two woolen Ethiopian blankets, he is asleep and I am writing in my journal. The month of Meuskeureum has just begun, it is Ethiopian New Year and Ruth, Clark and Tim are watching a New Year’s variety show on the TV. Ruth, bundled in blankets and snuggled between the family dogs, Tai and Mr. Magoo, watches fascinated by a program of Ethiopian dancing and traditional music, strange and Arabic in tone, played on instruments I have never seen before.

It takes me two or three days, and some boredom, before I gather the courage to venture outside the gates of this compound with the children and even then we do not go far, just around the block. I soon lose track of the gate we’ve left, and looking back, find the Urban’s house has disappeared behind numerous walls; all the mud and stone streets lined with other wealthy compounds interspersed with small, one- or two-room residences made out of eucalyptus saplings and roofed in tin, barely fenced at all so I can see right inside.

Our walk is short because an Ethiopian friend of Tim’s is taking us to the Addis market, said to be the largest open market in East Africa. Ruth could use another pair of shoes, and I have a list of gifts for her birthday next month, as well as Christmas shopping for both children. We climb into Tim’s VW Beetle, and the friend follows along in hers. Addis is high, cool and spacious, but the huge mercato is crowded, the narrow and bumpy side streets paved in large stones and mud and packed with people, small shops squeezed into every corner.

Tim and his friend lead us right to the items we need, including children’s clothing, toys and coloring and painting materials, and sweaters for us all. We visit small shops that sell imported jeans and locally made men’s suits and sweaters, as well as shoe shops where we buy both children tennis shoes from the Ethio-Czech factory here in Addis Ababa.

I feel my confidence growing. This immersion into the life of the market and of the city, accompanied by friends who are so at home in all of this and who obviously love the city and its people, is encouraging. We spend hours exploring rutted back streets lined with shops selling local textiles, some very colorful, others the white thin cloth men and women wear around their shoulders. Souvenir shops tempt the tourist to buy hide-covered drums, Coptic crosses, and short tapestries woven with a lion that represents the Lion of Judah, Emperor Haile Selassie, as well as black and white Guereza monkey skins that, we are warned, the customs man will quickly repossess when you are ready to depart the country.

After shopping, Tim takes us to the Addis Ababa restaurant, built to resemble a traditional tukul, circular with a thatched roof, which features traditional Ethiopian food eaten by hand. Our server brings bowls of warm water, soap, and hand towels, and we study the menu. Tim recommends several dishes that include chicken and boiled eggs, which are scored to let in a sauce is made from a mixture of red pepper and lots of shallots swimming in clarified butter, both hot and mild beef dishes, and a small serving of the traditional Ethiopian chopped raw beef smeared with pepper paste. Tom gets a peanut butter sandwich from home along with a glass of milk, but Ruth is as intrigued as the rest of us are, by the tall, colorful basket set in the middle of our party.

Soon, the various orders arrive. A large disk of thin, grey flat bread, called injera, is laid out on the metal platter that fills the center of the basket. Our several dishes are arranged on the injera, and we each get several rolled injera halves wrapped in a cloth napkin. We tear off a piece of the injera – it is not a yeast bread but is fermented, the surface covered tiny bubble indentations and the flavor faintly sour – and dip it into the various mixtures. Ruth likes the shiro best, a mixture of lentils, chick peas and beans and uncountable numbers of spices including garlic and cumin mixed in clarified butter.

I never realized there were so many different spices, at least 20 can go into every meal, and flavor follows flavor. One is musk, another pungent and salty, along with several different types of sour and variations on fermentation with bitter overtones that draw back the sides of your tongue. Ethiopians describe meat juice as sweet, but there no sweet in the sense that we understand. But there is a herbaceous sweetness, along the line of thyme or cilantro, similar to the odor arising from newly mowed grassland, a sweetness like drying hay that confuses your nose with your mouth. But one spice that I do recognize only too well is the red hot pepper.

At sunup the next morning, the whole city is roused by cannon shots from the Army encampment down in the center of town. The thirteenth month of Pagume is ended – it was just five days long – the calendar is turned to the first of Meuskeureum, and New Years celebrations have begun. Last night, the gate guards set off sparklers for Ruth and Tommy and the neighborhood children who stood around the edges. Today, the adults are busy planning the trip north to Gondar.

North to Gondar: It is 6 a.m. and just at this moment I wish I’d taken Clark’s advice and not been in such a hurry to reach Gondar. Clark wanted to take the local passenger flight that leaves in the afternoon at 2 p.m. That way we could have accepted Tim’s invitation to a going away lunch, but we’ve been guests of Tim’s here in Addis already for two weeks and had so many special lunches. In addition, I am out of patience with all the delays. I want to see the house and the town where we will be living for the next two years.

There is a later (10 a.m.) flight out of Addis, which would have been more relaxed. It is the flight scheduled for the Ethiopian Airlines Historic Tour flight and will be filled with tour groups just out of Kenya and working their way through the northern highlands on their way to Cairo, Egypt. But when Tim mentioned the earlier (6 a.m.) flight my mind was instantly made up, so now at the crack of dawn we find ourselves on a DC3 freight flight which delivers hardware, construction supplies, packages, and people to every little town that has any sort of an airstrip between Addis and goodness-knows-where.

Clark carries Tommy on his back in our Land’s End child carrier and I cling tightly to Ruth’s hand, as we climb into the plane. Instead of seats, everyone perches on canvas slings hung on iron piping on either side of the center isle, toes pressed against crates, bundles of merchant’s supplies, and piles of lumber that fill all additional space in the center. On the runway we hang on, trying not to slide into the person next to us as the plane tilts about 45 degrees while parked. We sit beside a wedding party of four women and three men. The men are tall, wear traditional white jodhpurs and long, white light cotton shawls wrapped around their shoulders.

Ruth, whose favorite things just now are hairstyles and pretty dresses, cannot take her eyes off the women. Each woman is coiffured in her own style of elaborate braids. Their long white dresses, which seem a combination of smart, modern styles and traditional dress, are woven from material that seems too fine and delicate to be cotton, with elaborate gold and silver-embedded embroidery along the hem, on the sleeves, and at the neck. Each woman wears a long white shawl with beautifully embroidered ends loosely wrapped around head and shoulders.

Other passengers are more plainly dressed in white cotton dresses, the men in trousers and jackets. But all are wrapped against the cold Addis Ababa air in the same shawls that look like lightweight blankets. A couple of the travelers carry tall, round, colorful eating baskets, already packed with food, and it smells good.

Tommy is excited to see the airplane, and even more excited to be inside one. There is no way he will sit in one of these sling seats, so must spend the trip in the baby carrier on Clark’s back, which brings laughter and stares from our fellow passengers. Men do not carry the children in Ethiopia; a mother wraps her baby in cloth pieces, then bundles the baby into a leather carrier which is then tied on with cloth strips that run over the mother’s shoulders and under her arms. An old woman comes close, speaking to us as she inspects Tom’s reddish hair and reaches out to try and squeeze him between his legs. The woman next to us is translating, She is saying he is too pretty to be a boy.

Someone else, sounding scornful, says, She is just a peasant. Another volunteers, These country people have never seen such a thing, a man carrying the baby on his back.

The plane must exchange freight and passengers three times before reaching our destination of Gondar. The first stop is Debra Marcos located along the main north-south highway, between Addis and the Blue Nile Gorge. The rainy season is just ending and out the plane’s small window I can see a scruffy corner of a muddy looking town bustling with lorry traffic. Next we land at the high plateau village of Debra Tabor. On approach, I see a smaller settlement, the fields look green and bulging with crops, the meadows filled with flocks of sheep and goats and thick stands of bright yellow daisies.

The third stop is Bahar Dar, on the south east shore of Lake Tana, about 50 miles south of Gondar along the trans-Ethiopia road. Before landing, our pilot makes several tight circles and tips the plane up on one wing announcing that we are flying over the Blue Nile Falls, one of the largest falls in Africa both by volume of water and the width of the falls. The Blue Nile flows away below us. Lake Tana, which is the source